(Radio Iowa) – The Army Corps of Engineers has completed significant repairs and upgrades to levies, dikes and other structures damaged by flooding along the Missouri River five years ago.
Clint Mason, the Corps’ Missouri River program manager, expects barge traffic to increase. Officials estimate Midwest flooding in 2019 caused nearly three BILLION dollars in damage. Congress allocated over 340-Million dollars to repair the Missouri River’s navigational channel. Low water levels in the river due to the recent drought helped speed those projects along.
There are about seven-thousand structures along the lower Missouri River, from Sioux City to St. Louis, that maintain a channel for boats and barges that’s 300 feet wide and nine feet deep.